Mr. Pugno seems to miss the fact that nobody has started up the spinerettes yet. Nanotube technology has only been around for about 10 years now and we still haven't gotten to the point of nanoassembled tubes, we're still using large scale deposition methods. The use of the term "never" in Pugno's analysis seems to imply a personal bias. Good scientific-method thinking doesn't, as far as I was trained, include the concept of never when you're talking about evolutions of existing technology. We might "never" have warp drive but it's only a matter of time until nanotubes, an existing technology, are spun up in practical sizes at strengths reaching 80%-90% of the theoretical maximum. Pugno seems to be spewing FUD which makes you wonder about his motivation.
Good god, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is perfect for teenage, but possibly not pre-teen, girls. Most of the rest of the stuff that's been mentioned, I'm sorry to say, is really more in the juvenile category and would be an insult to any decently intelligent, moderately read young lady
The current math the guy uses (in other publications) implies that ethanol can only be produced economically in vast quantities in distilleries powered by commercial electricity produced primarily via fossil fuels. In actuality a single standard wind turbine can produce enough electricity to power a household scale still sufficient to provide the mobile fuel requirements of a family, with power left over to buy down the family's electric bill. There's a page at the Iowa State University website that shows the break down. Once you do the math on energy budgets without the handicap of having to use the fuel you're compared against for your target production the numbers start to look real nice. Oh, and don't forget the environmental externalities of petroleum fuels that don't get added into this psuedo-economic analysis.
Cory Doctorow elucidates this idea. Based on the precedent of Heinlein and the waterbed these guys can't make any patent claims and if Doctorow wants he can charge royalties on the idea.
3 millisecond increase in the earth's speed of rotation may result (extreme long term) in global warming due to cumulative heat loss differences as the night side now has 1.5 milliseconds less time during which to dissipate heat. Then again this may balance out certain global warming effects due to the fact that we now will have 1.5 milliseconds less per day in which to accumulate heat that will be trapped by green house gasses.
The speed of rotation increased due to mass moving toward the center of rotation (remember the figure skater example). The subduction of the eastern (Pacific?) plate under the western (Indian?) plate moved more mass closer to the center than was moved away. The basic math on it is mass x radius change of the diving plate - the mass x radius change of the rising plate. Movements in have a greater effect on rotational speed (due to the percentage change in radius) than movements out by a common objective distance.
Even better look at particular product sections, say cellphones. Each cell phone model competes for resources (Sales) in it's environment and reproduces (Spawns new models) through mutation (radically new features or design) or sexual repro (inclusion of existing features from another line or simple iteration of existing design). Market Darwinism from a product POV is appropriate.
Atanasoff-Berry and the History of Computing
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 1
Growing up as you did in Ames, IA, home of Iowa State University and the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, where do you weigh in on the debate about the winner of title "First Electronic Computer"?
The other point to make is to differentiate between cell phones per person and cell phones per square mile. Obviously per mile^2 is going to show huge skew towards urban areas. I don't think there's a whole lot of local (non-economic linkable) variance in per person distribution of cell phones.
Actually there are very few populated areas left, even in the great plains, that don't have at least analog cell phone service (shitty though it may be). I've been in places in northeast Wyoming that had service (albeit only on hilltops) even when I was up to 35 miles from civilization (Thunder Basin National Grassland). I have to assume that most people, even out there, see the economic implication pretty clearly. Why have two phones with one that can't leave my house when I can have one that goes everywhere?
How are they getting away with using the Star Wars setting? I'd think the Lucasarts lawyers (they wear the white armor right?)would be down on these folks pretty quickly. And if they do have permission, how? Isn't Lucasarts historically quite fanatic about maintaining control of all Star Wars continuity and setting issues?
Actually alot of Haliburton's products and subsidiary services companies could very easily be used to support a Martian colony. The only problem is nobody would want to use their stuff.
What legal prohibitions to testing job applicants exist? I skills test all my applicants (in the bus business but still), the Feds test all their applicants. I've personally had to take several tests for different jobs. There's nothing wrong with using objective testing criteria, even arbitrary objective testing criteria, when screening job applicants.
Through all this I think most of us would agree that what JibJab has created is an amusing satirical parody. Beyond that it also brings into the discussion the fact that the creator of the original work, Woody Guthrie, made explicit comments regarding the distribution of his music. Not only do JibJab and the EFF have good grounds to win the case but also good grounds to have the later extensions to the original copyright reviewed as being explicitly against the written wishes of Woody Guthrie. I say it's time for a counter, these bastards have stolen enough from the amorphous "public" but here are even disgracing one of our greatest American songwriters.
good calls on both. I still think you're going to have problems with the energy though. Isn't it hard to recoup energy lost in reaction activation though? Not only that but, depending on assembly order/build timelines, how often are you going to have to cycle temperature to make it all work? While energy lost to reaction activation might be marginal when balanced against exo/endothermic reactions you still have so much wastage due to poor insulating and any cycling issues you have to deal with.
again, I read the book quite closely. Yes, Stephenson has a good description of The Feed and the Source, but we don't have anything near that infrastructure. And anybody who looks at fiber placements in the U.S. has a good idea of how hard it is to get companies/governments to make that level of investment. While the easiest method to feed a nano-replicator would be to sump gray/black water from the domicile even this would require major retrofitting. And energy sources have to be looked at critically.
No, read the full version. Energy source I'm questioning is different from the power conversion/storage/transmission methods you note. Also, aren't RFID tags powered by electrical induction, not filaments?
While the nano-replicators Stephenson envisions in Diamond Age are pretty cool the two things not well discussed were the source of raw materials (glossed over) and the power source (not discussed at all). We've still got a long way to go before these things can be worked out.
-The whole world is going to hell and I'm driving the bus...
Being from the area I'd say close the place down, the locals are just going to look up new ways to hide their meth labs and the tourists won't be sober enough to use a computer.
Actually the mass used for the Little Boy bomb was approximately 50lbs. Not much volume but uranium is damned heavy. And you're correct about the inefficiency of the fission, and that was even with an ideal sphere. Imagine the inefficiency of fission given a geometry like the human body.
Yes, yes it was... Asteroids can and do fall in towards the inner planets and given the mechanics it is entirely possible that an asteroid approaching the Earth would be hidden by the Sun's disc during it entire earth-bound flight
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? So we got new early game and end game content in BC which was great. But where's the love for the mid levellers?
And what's up with an "unlockable" end game class? Too lazy to balance the new class all the way through?
Mr. Pugno seems to miss the fact that nobody has started up the spinerettes yet. Nanotube technology has only been around for about 10 years now and we still haven't gotten to the point of nanoassembled tubes, we're still using large scale deposition methods. The use of the term "never" in Pugno's analysis seems to imply a personal bias. Good scientific-method thinking doesn't, as far as I was trained, include the concept of never when you're talking about evolutions of existing technology. We might "never" have warp drive but it's only a matter of time until nanotubes, an existing technology, are spun up in practical sizes at strengths reaching 80%-90% of the theoretical maximum. Pugno seems to be spewing FUD which makes you wonder about his motivation.
I Don't know about WoW but they do have an awesome version of Doom for this thing.
Good god, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is perfect for teenage, but possibly not pre-teen, girls. Most of the rest of the stuff that's been mentioned, I'm sorry to say, is really more in the juvenile category and would be an insult to any decently intelligent, moderately read young lady
The current math the guy uses (in other publications) implies that ethanol can only be produced economically in vast quantities in distilleries powered by commercial electricity produced primarily via fossil fuels. In actuality a single standard wind turbine can produce enough electricity to power a household scale still sufficient to provide the mobile fuel requirements of a family, with power left over to buy down the family's electric bill. There's a page at the Iowa State University website that shows the break down. Once you do the math on energy budgets without the handicap of having to use the fuel you're compared against for your target production the numbers start to look real nice. Oh, and don't forget the environmental externalities of petroleum fuels that don't get added into this psuedo-economic analysis.
- Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow elucidates this idea. Based on the precedent of Heinlein and the waterbed these guys can't make any patent claims and if Doctorow wants he can charge royalties on the idea.3 millisecond increase in the earth's speed of rotation may result (extreme long term) in global warming due to cumulative heat loss differences as the night side now has 1.5 milliseconds less time during which to dissipate heat. Then again this may balance out certain global warming effects due to the fact that we now will have 1.5 milliseconds less per day in which to accumulate heat that will be trapped by green house gasses.
The speed of rotation increased due to mass moving toward the center of rotation (remember the figure skater example). The subduction of the eastern (Pacific?) plate under the western (Indian?) plate moved more mass closer to the center than was moved away. The basic math on it is mass x radius change of the diving plate - the mass x radius change of the rising plate. Movements in have a greater effect on rotational speed (due to the percentage change in radius) than movements out by a common objective distance.
Even better look at particular product sections, say cellphones. Each cell phone model competes for resources (Sales) in it's environment and reproduces (Spawns new models) through mutation (radically new features or design) or sexual repro (inclusion of existing features from another line or simple iteration of existing design). Market Darwinism from a product POV is appropriate.
Read System of the World
Growing up as you did in Ames, IA, home of Iowa State University and the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, where do you weigh in on the debate about the winner of title "First Electronic Computer"?
The other point to make is to differentiate between cell phones per person and cell phones per square mile. Obviously per mile^2 is going to show huge skew towards urban areas. I don't think there's a whole lot of local (non-economic linkable) variance in per person distribution of cell phones.
Actually there are very few populated areas left, even in the great plains, that don't have at least analog cell phone service (shitty though it may be). I've been in places in northeast Wyoming that had service (albeit only on hilltops) even when I was up to 35 miles from civilization (Thunder Basin National Grassland). I have to assume that most people, even out there, see the economic implication pretty clearly. Why have two phones with one that can't leave my house when I can have one that goes everywhere?
How are they getting away with using the Star Wars setting? I'd think the Lucasarts lawyers (they wear the white armor right?)would be down on these folks pretty quickly. And if they do have permission, how? Isn't Lucasarts historically quite fanatic about maintaining control of all Star Wars continuity and setting issues?
Actually alot of Haliburton's products and subsidiary services companies could very easily be used to support a Martian colony. The only problem is nobody would want to use their stuff.
What legal prohibitions to testing job applicants exist? I skills test all my applicants (in the bus business but still), the Feds test all their applicants. I've personally had to take several tests for different jobs. There's nothing wrong with using objective testing criteria, even arbitrary objective testing criteria, when screening job applicants.
Through all this I think most of us would agree that what JibJab has created is an amusing satirical parody. Beyond that it also brings into the discussion the fact that the creator of the original work, Woody Guthrie, made explicit comments regarding the distribution of his music. Not only do JibJab and the EFF have good grounds to win the case but also good grounds to have the later extensions to the original copyright reviewed as being explicitly against the written wishes of Woody Guthrie. I say it's time for a counter, these bastards have stolen enough from the amorphous "public" but here are even disgracing one of our greatest American songwriters.
good calls on both. I still think you're going to have problems with the energy though. Isn't it hard to recoup energy lost in reaction activation though? Not only that but, depending on assembly order/build timelines, how often are you going to have to cycle temperature to make it all work? While energy lost to reaction activation might be marginal when balanced against exo/endothermic reactions you still have so much wastage due to poor insulating and any cycling issues you have to deal with.
again, I read the book quite closely. Yes, Stephenson has a good description of The Feed and the Source, but we don't have anything near that infrastructure. And anybody who looks at fiber placements in the U.S. has a good idea of how hard it is to get companies/governments to make that level of investment. While the easiest method to feed a nano-replicator would be to sump gray/black water from the domicile even this would require major retrofitting.
And energy sources have to be looked at critically.
No, read the full version. Energy source I'm questioning is different from the power conversion/storage/transmission methods you note. Also, aren't RFID tags powered by electrical induction, not filaments?
While the nano-replicators Stephenson envisions in Diamond Age are pretty cool the two things not well discussed were the source of raw materials (glossed over) and the power source (not discussed at all). We've still got a long way to go before these things can be worked out.
-The whole world is going to hell and I'm driving the bus...
Being from the area I'd say close the place down, the locals are just going to look up new ways to hide their meth labs and the tourists won't be sober enough to use a computer.
Actually the mass used for the Little Boy bomb was approximately 50lbs. Not much volume but uranium is damned heavy. And you're correct about the inefficiency of the fission, and that was even with an ideal sphere. Imagine the inefficiency of fission given a geometry like the human body.
Yes, yes it was... Asteroids can and do fall in towards the inner planets and given the mechanics it is entirely possible that an asteroid approaching the Earth would be hidden by the Sun's disc during it entire earth-bound flight
Whoa, calm down there Ender...